As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is a piece of cake!
Perfect
The demand for the perfect is the enemy of the possible good. Be peace and do justice, but let’s not expect perfection in ourselves or the world. Perfectionism contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism and makes ordinary love largely impossible. Jesus was an absolute realist, patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a “salvation scheme” or a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, and to love the way that God loves—which we cannot do by ourselves.
Richard Rohr
Effective Alturism
Imagine that you have $1. You’re planning to donate that dollar to charity and have narrowed your options down to two causes: your alma mater’s endowment fund, which awards scholarships for academically gifted students, and a non-profit that delivers life-saving vitamin supplements to children in extreme poverty.
To help make your decision, you might rely on a social movement and philosophy called effective altruism—or EA for short. Effective altruism is dedicated to using evidence and reason to do the most good in the world. Effective altruists try to accomplish this maximum good by supporting philanthropic causes that get the biggest return on investment. An effective altruist, then, would probably encourage you to donate your $1 to the organization that provides vitamin supplements over the university.
Decentered
Christianity loses its true center when it seeks to convince the world of its commitment to the modern project. At present, there is a growing collection of Christian Churches, hollowed out by their embrace of the modern, secular account of reality. In a drive for relevance, they became redundant.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Questions designed by a PhD psychologist to help develop close living relationships.
If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
Age of the Selfie
Though we live in the age of the “selfie,” we are, nonetheless, an age that is distracted from the true knowledge of the self. The “selfie” has nothing to do with self-knowledge and everything to do with an objectification of the self – how I would like myself to look if I were someone else. What the selfie never shows is how we truly perceive ourselves.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Religion, at it’s best, is a place where people from a variety of economic, social, racial and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith. It’s a place to build bridges to folks who are different than you. Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best.
Instead, it’s become a hospital for the healthy, an echo chamber for folks who did everything “right,” which means that it’s seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way. Do I think that houses of worship have done this on purpose? Generally speaking, no. But they also haven’t actively refuted this narrative.
I was always told that the job of a preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Maybe we need a lot more of the latter going forward.
Old People
There’s a stereotype that older people are grumpy shut-ins—withering away inside while yelling at some kid to get off their lawn. That judgment is obviously sweeping and unfair, but perhaps it’s also emerged, in part, from some real tendencies—tendencies that might be better understood as justified reactions to a harsh and inaccessible world. America’s population is rapidly growing older, and life expectancy, except for a recent dip, has been getting longer. By 2040, about one in five Americans will be 65 or older; as recently as 2000, that number was one in eight. Perhaps we’d do well to consider what older people’s living conditions can push them to become.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/07/old-age-personality-brain-changes-psychology/674668/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230712&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily
“Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble the football “…
– John Heisman, first football coach at Rice
View from the front porch
“schadenfreude”
experiencing satisfaction from someone else’s misfortune.
My encounter with schadenfreude is not overt but subtle. It has occurred in reflection on circumstances of those experiencing misfortune as a result of decisions contrary to my opinions/beliefs. In moments of honest introspection, I realize that I experience pleasant satisfaction of others’ misfortune. The fact that I am restrained from expressing my satisfaction publicly is encouraging, but the truth is plain, there’s within me an undeniable schadenfreude impulse.
This realization is troubling. As a Christ follower, I believe “schadenfreude” is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit nor does it reflect the mind of Christ. Its presence reveals sin which thrives in the shadows of my soul. A sin which cannot be absolved by sin management i.e. restraint in speaking or acting out. Overcoming “schadenfreude” requires the transcendent power of God.
Celebration of other’s misfortune is not unusual, in fact, for most of us it comes easily and is consistent with our highly competitive and individualistic culture. Opponents’ demise is the desired outcome. Victory, even if it comes as result of our opponents bad luck, is always occasion for celebration, a fulfillment of our wishes (or prayers?) that they— “get what they deserve” et al. The opportunity to be proved right and to say, or, at a minimum, think “I told you so” is delicious. Dramatic polarization in our society has elevated “schadenfreude” to normal.
The presence of Schadenfreude reveals sin that is deeper “than “missing the mark” —moral failure — a mistake. It isn’t a mistake. It is a power that can reign and rule my mind and body, forcing you me obey, having dominion over me; a false god to whom I give idolatrous allegiance. Defying sin management, schadenfreude’s antidote is found in Romans 6: “…present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” [Adapted from Richard Beck’s post ]
If these thoughts haven’t caused you to rethink any impulse to celebrate the misfortune of others, and you are convinced that justice should prevail. then consider this passage from proverbs:
Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble do not let your heart rejoice, or the LORD will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from them (Proverbs 24:17-18).
STILL ON THE JOURNEY